THE CONVERSATION MATURES

High-tech marketing is all grown up.

Just a few years ago, being a direct marketer in the high-tech space was like being the parent of a 10- or 12-year old, says Theresa Kushner, director of customer intelligence at Cisco. If you gave them the right direction and incentives, you had a good shot at swaying their behavior.

“Today, we're in the world of teenagers, where we're lucky if we can engage with them at all,” says Kushner. “We basically have to lurk on the outskirts and listen to the way they talk to their friends and be available when they need money.”

From a marketing perspective, this means companies like Cisco have to be everywhere for their customers.

“We're doing a lot of brand activity to engage our customers,” she says. “We have to be on the right Web sites when they go there for information. It could be a retail site for executives. It could be a site that CIOs visit. We have to be where groups of people congregate and we have to be relevant to them at that place and time. If you're used to sending messages out to people and expect them to come, you're whole world changes if all you can do is listen to the customer and be responsive to them when they want to engage.

“If I'm selling switches and routers, I need to be relevant where people who buy switches and routers go. And I need to speak in their language consistently,” she says. “I have to talk about the product in the same way, no matter who is doing the talking.”

This push mentality creates all kinds of challenges, including measurement. This, says Kushner, means having crystal clear objectives about what you want to accomplish.

For example, if you want to show you're making an impact into the retail market, you have to be really good about taking baselines of what you start with and where you move to,” she notes. “I'm not sure in the DM world we had to take baselines about anything.”

While phone is still predominant in the lead generation world, the majority of Cisco's marketing efforts are online, in the form of activities like e-mail, search and Webinars.

Looking forward to 2008, Cisco is prospecting into new markets, promoting not only its mainstay networking technology but other products as well. And it is beginning to target consumers, looking at who might be the first wave of adopters for its products.

The company is also working with social networking, and exploring how to manage — or not manage word-of-mouth marketing.

“That's a big area for us,” she says. “What does it take to manage that interaction where all we can do is sit on the outside and be available when they have a question or need someone to talk to. It's a different way of looking at all of our markets.”